The Surfside condo collapse and NYC’s BQE
This Guest Editorial originally appeared in the New York Daily News. We are reprinting it here with permission from the Brooklyn Heights Association.
The catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, Fla., should be a serious wake-up call to elected officials who have failed to heed warnings and address our crumbling, dangerous urban infrastructure. While President Biden’s infrastructure bill may provide the necessary federal funding to achieve some of these repairs, without local elected leadership and community engagement, many of the most dire projects are at risk of collapse.
We have a glaring example right here in NYC. The triple-cantilever section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, or BQE, is in danger of failure. This unique feat of engineering features two stacked three-lane highways cantilevered off the bluff of Brooklyn Heights, topped by a third cantilever, the world-famous Promenade with its iconic views of Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. All of this is perched above the wildly popular tourist destination, Brooklyn Bridge Park, which welcomes more than 5 million visitors a year. This precarious section of the BQE was designed to carry 47,000 vehicles a day but now carries a whopping 150,000 vehicles daily, including 15,000 trucks. It is not hyperbolic to assume that a collapse of this section could claim the lives of pedestrians above and below the doubledecker highway, in addition to countless motorists.